Netanyahu Visit Embarrasses Even Israel's Most Ardent Supporters

By Richard H. Curtiss

Americans knew that Binyamin Netanyahu's three-day Washington, DC visit had turned into a public relations disaster on its second day, Jan. 20, when the two hosts on CNN's popular nightly "Crossfire" program, arch-conservative Pat Buchanan and arch-liberal Bill Press, began competing to see who could be most critical of the intransigent Israeli prime minister. They started by goading guest Zbigniew Brzezinski, the super-sharp White House national security adviser during the administration of former President Jimmy Carter, into reluctantly blaming Netanyahu for the breakdown in land-for-peace negotiations with Yasser Arafat.

By the time the half-hour television program had finished, Brzezinski had declared that the Palestinians had the right to an independent (but demilitarized) state "like everyone else" and suggested that the U.S. should stop vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli settlements; Republican Buchanan had charged that President Bill Clinton was "too weak" to challenge the cocky Israeli prime minister and his American Jewish supporters; and Democrat Press, a diehard Clinton apologist, expressed near certainty that Clinton was confronting Netanyahu in their private talks because the alternative would be the end of the peace process—which he described as a disaster for the Palestinians, the United States and Israel. (Subsequent accounts indicate Buchanan was right and Press was wrong.)

Clearly, in publicly taking on the U.S. president in his own capital, Netanyahu was increasing Israel's international isolation, but perhaps strengthening his standing with his own right-wing political base in Israel. Aside from the temporary crumbling of U.S. media taboos against criticizing incumbent Israeli governments, Netanyahu's actions upon arrival in Washington also were unprecedented. He went directly from the airport to a rally in support of Israel organized by Morton Klein, hard-line president of the Zionist Organization of America, and Christian fundamentalist leader Jerry Falwell, founder of the now quiescent "Moral Majority." Falwell, who travels in a private aircraft presented to him by the Israeli government, has become a sulphurous Clinton critic. In fact, Falwell sells for $30 a videotape called "The Clinton Files" which actually accuses the U.S. president of being a drug user and having been implicated in drug dealing and murders in Arkansas while he was serving as governor there before he was elected president.

Before meeting with Clinton, Netanyahu also granted a radio interview to Christian fundamentalist television evangelist Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, and visited Republican House of Representatives leader Newt Gingrich.

The message to Clinton who, according to U.S. Jewish weekly newspapers, received about 85 percent of the Jewish vote in the 1992 election and 88 percent in 1996, was that if Clinton allows the Democratic Party to abandon its traditional, undiluted support for the Jewish state, Netanyahu will turn to the Republicans and the Christian Coalition, the most conservative element within the Republican Party.

In the past the Christian Coalition has become known for its strong opposition to abortion under any circumstances and to the teaching of evolution in U.S. public schools unless they also teach "creationism," the belief that the world was created in seven days. Netanyahu's implied threat was that Robertson and Falwell would turn their well-funded efforts to persuading Christian Coaltion leaders to add blind support of Israeli territorial expansion to their agenda, and thus inject it into Republican Party policies.

All this provided an interesting backdrop to a remark by Press on the CNN program that Netanyahu's support in public opinion polls in Israel was "almost as low" as Gingrich's in public opinion polls in the United States.

Gingrich's gesture in meeting with Netanyahu before the Israeli leader went to the White House to challenge the U.S. president was a classic example of what politicians call Gingrich's political "tin ear." Since Gingrich became Republican House leader through sheer energy and brashness, he has became a huge embarrassment to more moderate traditional Republicans. Charged with corruption by the House Ethnics Committee, Gingrich was sentenced to a stiff fine and was lucky to escape expulsion from Congress.

His reaction has been to begin lining up backers for a run for the U.S. presidency in the year 2000, despite having the lowest public approval rating (around 35 percent) of any major national political figure (Clinton's approval rating before a sex scandal erupted immediately after the Netanyahu visit had been hovering around 65 percent for the previous year, despite his earlier severe problems with charges of personal and political corruption.)

Gingrich's gesture in meeting Netanyahu at the same time that many pro-Israel U.S. media figures and a slight majority of mainstream American Jewish leaders were putting distance between themselves and the Israeli prime minister suggests that in addition to being ethically challenged, the House Republican leader may be arithmetically challenged as well. Apparently Gingrich can't count potential voters or is unaware of the changing demographics of the United States.

Being photographed with an unpopular Israeli prime minister is unlikely to win Gingrich or the Republican Party many votes or campaign contributions from America's traditionally liberal and overwhelmingly Democratic Jewish community, which now numbers no more than 5 million people or just under 2 percent of the U.S. population. What it is far more likely to do is alienate Muslim Americans, of whom there are 6 to 8 million in the U.S., and Christian Arab Americans, of whom there are an additional 1.5 to 2 million.

Together these two communities potentially are able to produce twice as many votes as the U.S. Jewish community. More important is the fact that these Muslim Americans and Christian voters of Middle Eastern ethnicity are concentrated in such key states as California, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan, without whose massive share of the electoral votes no candidate can win the presidency.

In 1996 Muslims in Detroit—which has some 43 mosques, some with congregations numbering in the thousands—actually circulated cards containing written endorsements of 19 carefully selected candidates for the U.S. Congress and for state, county and municipal offices and judgeships, along with recommendations on whether to vote yes or no on six voter initiatives.

This year Muslim organizations in major metropolitan areas throughout the United States are seeking to reach similar consensus agreements on candidates, and then turn out their communities en masse to vote as a bloc in state primary elections and in the national elections in November.

Leaders of national Islamic organizations also are working to convince U.S. adherents to Islam, which is the fastest growing religion both in the world and in the United States, to vote as a bloc in the U.S. presidential elections in the year 2000.

That will not be easy. African-American Muslims traditionally lean toward the Democratic Party, as does the rest of the African-American community. At the same time, many members of the huge post-World War II "third wave" of Islamic immigrants to America, which deposited on U.S. shores tens of thousands of highly educated Muslim professionals from the Middle East, South Asia and Europe, lean toward the Republican Party on economic and moral issues, but find themselves in tune with the Democratic Party's more liberal positions on immigration laws.

Most Muslim leaders agree, however, that regardless of these differences, in 1998 their most important goal is to demonstrate that the Muslim community votes, and that it can unite around individual candidates so that Muslim voters do not cancel each other out. If that can be done, the seemingly more difficult problem of selecting a consensus presidential candidate may be simplified as national candidates start paying attention to Muslim as well as Jewish foreign policy concerns.

It would be nice to believe that by the year 2000 Israel will have reached land-for-peace settlements with the Palestinians and all of its other Arab neighbors, and that burning issue will have been removed from the U.S. Muslim agenda. With Netanyahu in power, however, that seems extremely unlikely. Therefore, if a just peace in Palestine and Jerusalem remains the top issue with Arab Americans and U.S. Muslims, some predictions already are in order.

If the Democratic Party's presidential candidate in the year 2000 is Al Gore, the Muslim and Arab American vote almost certainly will go to a Republican. Gore's bias toward Israel seems to transcend political opportunism and have an ideological component—perhaps based both upon his Christian fundamentalist roots in Tennessee and his lifelong dependence upon the Israeli lobby and such pro-Israel mentors from his university days as New Republic magazine publisher Martin Peretz, with whose family Gore's family vacations every summer.

Similarly, in the extremely unlikely event that Gingrich became the Republican presidential candidate in the year 2000, the Muslim-American and Arab-American vote might go to a Democrat, even Gore. Gingrich's attachment to Israel appears opportunistic but strong, based both upon the Christian fundamentalist vote in his home state of Georgia, and the fact that Israel's powerful U.S. lobby began supporting him many years ago.

To date in his political career, Gingrich has collected $95,434 in campaign contributions from pro-Israel political action committees. More important, Gingrich's wife, Marianne, has accepted a public relations position with an Israeli-American company which is developing a free port and tax-free industrial zone in Israel. He refuses to reveal her total compensation package, which is based not only on a salary but also on commissions for each U.S. enterprise that she convinces to set up operations in the zone. (The fact that Gingrich sees no ethical problem with his wife receiving a commission on funds spent by major U.S. corporations with her Israeli-American employer illustrates why he has become such a political liability to the Republican Party.)

Finally, in answer to the obvious question, in a Gore-Gingrich contest, any Muslim and Arab-American bloc vote probably would go to a third-party candidate. In any case, if American Muslim leaders demonstrate in 1998 that their rapidly growing community can register and turn out in huge numbers to vote as a bloc in state contests, the days are numbered for politicians who use Israeli compasses to navigate American political shoals. And, fortunately, when such panderers no longer dominate the U.S. political scene, uncompromising Israeli politicians like Binyamin Netanyahu, too, may become little more than a bitter memory for Israeli and Arab moderates when they resume their interrupted march toward a lasting land-for-peace Middle East agreement.

Richard Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.